I spotted Jay right away, standing by the bar, but not at it, just to the right of a bright red stool.

I would have known him even if he hadn't been scanning the room in that blind-date sort of way, more apprehension than hope. There was something indefinably American about him. My father always says you can tell by the shoes, but I thought it had more to do with the way his brown hair was a little too neatly brushed, and his features a little too clean-cut, as if everything had been pressed out of a plaster mold, from the top of his neatly parted hair to the leather tassels on his loafers. Like a Ken doll.

I wondered if he bent at the waist. My Ken didn't, which was a source of great annoyance to his harem of Barbie dolls, who could never get him to sit down for dinner in the Barbie dream house. Maybe that's why he was standing instead of sitting at the bar.

Pushing such irrelevancies out of my mind, I gave a little smile and wave—just enough to indicate greeting, but not enthusiastic enough to be misconstrued as "take me now!"—and made my way toward the bar.

"Eloise?"

His voice in person was better than on the phone, less gravelly. Which made sense, given that it was coming from right there, rather than through strange, wireless contraptions.

"Hi!" I said, sticking out a hand. "And you're Jay?"

Rather than shake my hand, he did a clasp and pull. Taken off balance, I stumbled slightly as his lips brushed my cheek, landing heavily against the bar, and trying to look as though I'd meant it all along.

"Are you hungry?" he asked, signaling to a waiter.

I wondered what he would say if I said no.

"Starved," I replied.

As witty repartee went, so far we were scoring a zero. Next we'd be talking about the weather. No wonder I hadn't been on a date in over a year; it was about as lively as a trip to the dentist. The waiter stuck two menus under his arm and marched off among the brightly colored tables with their mismatched plates. We followed.

"Did you have a nice trip from Birmingham?" I asked, in the interest of keeping the conversational ball rolling.

"Not bad," he said, draping his too neatly folded raincoat over the back of his chair. And there was silence. I concentrated on shaking the deep blue napkin out over my skirt. Jay rearranged his coat. The waiter hovered solicitously.

"Would you care for a drink to start?" the waiter asked.

Would I ever.

I ordered white wine. Jay ordered beer.

As the waiter retreated, I observed Jay covertly from behind my menu. At least he wasn't a wine snob. That was a point in his favor.

But beer…it was so deliberately unpretentious that it smacked of pretension, like a plaid shirt. It screamed, I'm just one of the guys. Wouldn't a man who was comfortable with his own masculinity be able to order a glass of wine? What was he trying to prove?

I realized I was staring, and scuttled back behind the neatly printed rows of saags and naan, feeling like an idiot.

I was going to stop it now. Ordering beer didn't mean anything other than that he felt like beer. And I wasn't allowed to read into his entrйe order, either, or the fact that he'd chosen to wear a jacket but not a tie. A jacket without a tie was a bit like a designer beer, too dressy to be really casual. I'd be willing to bet his apartment was filled with furniture hewed off at odd angles, expensive electronic devices from Sharper Image, and dishes that had been deliberately treated with a lumpy glaze designed to make them look like the painstaking product of Guatemalan peasants (only twenty bucks per plate at Bloomies).

Staring unseeingly at a neat column of entrees, I remembered something Alex had said to me ages ago. Okay, fine, three months ago, but it felt like ages. I'd been moaning about my single state, and griping about the dearth of datable prospects in London. After I'd explained why every single person at Pammy's latest dinner party—even the single ones of the right age who didn't live with their parents and had no obvious deformities—was ineligible for some reason or other, there had been a long pause.

"Nobody wants me," I moaned. "I'm going to be alone forevvvvvvver."

In one of those very measured voices that people use when they know they're saying something that their hearer is not going to like, Alex had said, "Have you ever thought, Eloise, that it's not that they write you off—it's that you write them off?"

No, I hadn't. Me write them off? Who was kidding whom here? I couldn't help it if men were scared away by the fact that my degrees were better than theirs.

"Uh-huh," said Alex.

She just didn't understand. How could she, when she'd been with Sean since college? Dating had changed. After about twenty-six or so, it got gruesome, all those defensive men out there who were just looking for sweet young things to bolster their egos. Look at the way Grant had ditched me for that twenty-two-year-old art historian, the one who thought all his articles were brilliant, giggled at even the lamest of his puns (and a pun is, by definition, lame), and would never have pointed out that his argument in footnote forty-three made no sense. I had little lines next to my eyes when I smiled, and sometimes even when I didn't smile. I was too old, too prickly, too opinionated.

Maybe Alex had been right.

After all, here was a perfectly presentable specimen of American manhood sitting in front of me, whose only flaws thus far were excessive grooming and dubious beverage choice, and I was already racking up the reasons why we would never work and preparing a mental report to Grandma on same, to be presented in bullet points, in triplicate.

It wasn't his fault he wasn't a snippy Englishman.

In fact, that ought to be to his credit. That, I thought, scowling at the menu, was my problem. My stomach always went into flutters for the wrong sort of man. I chose the showy, the flashy, the obvious. I gravitated to those men who exuded brash confidence, the sort who could usually be found dominating a podium or monopolizing the conversation at a cocktail party. Underneath the garrulous exterior, they were inevitably melting marshmallows of insecurity. But by the time I discovered the gooey center, it was always too late. I was stuck.

Take Grant as case in point. Brilliant at a podium, needy as hell in private.

"Would you like to share some naan?" I asked Jay, as part of my genuine, good-faith effort to give the date a chance.

We solemnly discussed the merits of onion as opposed to garlic naan. Countries have been ceded and boundaries redrawn with less deliberation. The waiter hovered a bit, left to bring our drinks, and then hovered again. I could practically see him thinking, "Sod it all, just order them both and get it over with."

We finally settled on onion and placed our order. I ought to have felt a sense of great accomplishment. Instead, I just felt tired. And hungry.

I settled back in my chair, which had a curious egg-shaped back, and wrapped my fingers around the stem of my wineglass.

He really was perfectly good-looking. No warts. No visible deformities. He didn't have a squeaky voice, or a lisp, or an embarrassing overbite.

It shouldn't matter that the sight of him didn't set little butterflies fluttering in my chest. I'd had flutters for Grant in the beginning, and, far more recently, for Colin. Flutters didn't last. Shared background and experience did. As he handed his menu back to the waiter, I totted up all the reasons why Jay was a good idea. Nice boy. No warts. Friend of the family. Steady job. I didn't even know if Colin had a job.

Jay, I reminded myself. I was supposed to be focusing on Jay. Not Colin.

"What are you doing in England?" I asked, beginning the obligatory first-date inquisition. "Grandma didn't say."

"I help technological service providers actualize their human resource objectives," Jay said.

I could have sworn the individual words were all in English, but they didn't seem to fit together in any comprehensible way. I broke it down into its component parts and attempted a translation. "You work with computers?"

Jay smiled tolerantly. "Close. I work with people who work with computers."

"Ah," I said intelligently. "So what's your role, then?"

I won't attempt to reproduce the answer—I couldn't do it justice. Essentially, his role seemed to have something to do with herding temperamental computer scientists into line and making them work harder and more efficiently. This was followed by a long explanation of something called "interfacing," which boiled down to being a middleman between clients and the computer scientists. The computer scientists apparently spoke Java, with a side of Klingon, and the businesspeople communicated in various dialects designed to maximize the number of syllables, while minimizing actual content.

"How interesting!" I exclaimed. It sounded deathly dull. "How did you get into that?"

It turned out that when he graduated from college, with a degree in econ, he knew a guy who knew another guy. Three guys later, we had made it past the first joyous euphoria of the Internet bubble, politely mourned the wreckage of his first two Internet start-up companies, and gone backpacking in the Himalayas. At least, I think he said the Himalayas. Wherever it was, they had mountain peaks and no hair-dryers.

"Birmingham must be pretty dull after that," I said.

"I'm not there most weekends. My mother said you're in school here?" Jay asked, politely turning the conversation to me. He added, "I have some friends at the LSE."